Stronger Drawer Construction for A'vans

The A'van has some excellent joinery work and overall is well above average, but it is sadly let down rather badly with the two cabinet drawers, as they are the pre-fabricated chip board style that really aren't designed for caravan use. Most manufacturers have phased them out. All is not lost as you can easily beef them up to give years of service. They usually fail at the rear and some have the fronts fall off. This can be fixed by carefully inserting screws into the rear together with copious quantities of the best glue you can lay your hands on - avoid ordinary PVA - try to get Prep Multi Purpose Adhesive - yellow bottle, 250 ml around $6.95. When they fail at the front the best repair is to re-glue then use two small aluminium angle brackets or use the small zinc plated angle brackets made by Zenith about $3.75 a pair. See the pictures below. Best not to use bigger than 75mm or it looks a bit too heavy. The screws supplied in the Zenith packets are too long so you will have to buy shorter ones. By all means use the longer ones at the front and screw into the front cover as well. We favour the aluminium approach and you can get 25 X 25 X 3mm aluminium angle from Hardwarehouse or Bunnings. Usually you have to buy a metre, but the bit left over is handy for other camper jobs! 

A Better Modification

Alternatively you could bite the bullet and turn a simple repair into a major project - after all isn't this what retirement is for? We saw the draws below at a Brisbane Caravan Show and could see this system being easily adapted to suit our A'van. Basically the draws are 100% plywood using steel runners. The existing A'van draw fronts could still be used. These are held on with two small aluminium brackets. We liked the cross brace idea right along the front and the moulding put along the tops of the two sides - really made a beautiful job. We found them on a Winnebago - take a peek as there are lots of good ideas in there just waiting to be adapted to our campers! Whilst doing this job it could be a good move to extend the overall length to regain some of the lost space behind the existing draws. You do need a cut-out on the top draw if you have a power point mounted there. Moving the power point to the sink side could be a good move as this then allows you to use the full length gaining 200 mm of extra room. Don't forget this must be done by an electrician. You can legally move the 12 volt socket though. If you look through the archives at the bottom of this page there are several really good examples of other approaches to this problem. None of the above applies to Chalet owners as their draws are fine and go right to the outside wall - made from sturdy 5 ply too. Maybe one day A'van will get around to doing it this way as well.

Bob & Chrissy Eustace